Jews Across the Americas, 1492-present

Learning and Teaching Jewish American History

Jews Across the Americas, 1492-present

Cara Rock-Singer

Cara Rock-Singer is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is also affiliated with the Center for Jewish Studies, Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. Her research and teaching center on the relationship among gender, Judaism, and science and technology in the United States. Her book project, Gestating Judaism: The Corporeal Technologies of American Jewish Religion, shows how reproductive bodies serve as often-unacknowledged infrastructure of religious communities and how feminist movements have mobilized new media, technoscience, and biomedicine to craft embodied political theologies.

She is available to give talks or class visits online or in person for a fee. Languages: English

Website: www.cararocksinger.com

CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_xa_MvgsFpCJnCIGh4cjhn3QVD_o_I9g/view?usp=sharing

Recent Work: “Immersions in a Contagious Summer,” Contagion Symposium, Political Theology Network. https://politicaltheology.com/immersions-in-a-contagious-summer/

Laura Leibman

Laura Arnold Leibman is Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Her work focuses on religion and the daily lives of women and children in early America, and uses everyday objects to help bring their stories back to life. She is the author of "The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects" (BGC 2020), "Indian Converts" (UMass Press, 2008) and "Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life" (Vallentine Mitchell, 2012), which won a National Jewish Book Award, a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies, and was selected as one of Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013. Laura has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University, Utrecht University, the University of Panama, and the Leon Levy Foundation Professor of Jewish Material Culture at Bard Graduate Center. Laura, who earned her PhD from UCLA, is currently at work on a book that uses material culture to trace the history of members of a multiracial family who began their lives enslaved in the Caribbean but became some of the wealthiest Jews in New York.